Film and television adaptations of video games
Open-knowledge reference entry
Numerous electronic and video games have been adapted into film and television media, with such adaptations incorporating elements of their narrative, characters, and gameplay.
The first and earliest adaptation of a video game was the American animated series Pac-Man (1982–1983), loosely based on a 1980 Japanese video game of the same name by Toru Iwatani, produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions. Early adaptations were created cheaper and faithfully, such as Saturday Supercade (1983–1984), Pole Position (1984), and Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! (1986). Television adaptations of video games became more popular in the late 1980s and 1990s, driven by its popularity and generally garnered mixed and positive responses by critics and fans of video games. Quintessentially, the live action game show Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1991–1995) and its follow-ups of Carmen Sandiego were critically praised and won several Daytime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award.
The Hollywood film industry began making live-action film adaptations in the mid-1990s, including Super Mario Bros. (1993), Double Dragon, and Street Fighter (both 1994). Most of these films were typically made to capitalize on the popularities of these games, and tried to incorporate the interactivity of a video game to the fixed medium with mixed results, with several of these films being critically panned.
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This entry incorporates text from “Film and television adaptations of video games” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.